Linux Magazine has a profile of Daniel Fore and the Elementary project. Elementary is a Linux distro that's committed to a clean and simple user experience, but it's more than a distro - it's actually a multi-pronged effort to make improvements to the user experience for a whole ecosystem of components, including icons, a GTK theme, Midori improvements, Nautilus, and even Firefox. The work that elementary is doing isn't limited to their own distro, and some of their work is available in current, and perhaps future, Ubuntu releases. The results are really striking, and I think it's probably the handsomest Linux UI I've ever seen.

If you're going to copy osx, at least do it right. Use gnustep/etoile and finish the damn APIs. Get all the open source osx software ported to linux, by that point your api's should be close enough to osx to get a lot of the professional mac software ported. Sure you'll never get apple porting apps but you can still get to a very usable system point. Might even get Adobe porting if you do a good enough job.

There's 200,000 iphone/ipad developers, hitting them up for code on linux would be a decent way to expand the developerbase of linux. Plus there's a bunch of cool toys we could get ported. ATM GNUStep is working on porting coregraphics to linux. Would be interesting if linux could run most iphone/ipad apps.

Finishing GnuSTEP would be nice, but I don't think its ever going to happen. I tried GnuSTEP (Ubuntu 10.04, installed from Synaptic) a few weeks ago, and it is an absolute disaster. Its still about 5% there, I really can't tell what has changed since freaking 1996 or 1997 when I tried it last. WTF have the GnuSTEP devs don in 14 freaking years???